


the rotten core at the center of everything

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: ALL THE SKYE FEELS, Angst, F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Kree (Marvel), Male-Female Friendship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, POV Skye | Daisy Johnson, Pre-Canon, Romance, Skye | Daisy Johnson's Superpowers, St. Agnes Orphanage, mentions of Mack/Tim, mentions of Miles/Skye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-23 23:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4896022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People have used a lot of words to describe her over the years. Not all of them good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the rotten core at the center of everything

**bad influence**

Didi gets a scratch on her arm when they are coming back through the fire escape and that's the first time she gets someone hurt, or that someone gets hurt just from being around her, she's not sure there's a difference.

She wouldn't normally let anyone come with her when she slips out of the orphanage but the other girl had been pestering her for weeks. 

She did warn Didi about the stairwell. She had already ripped her favorite pair of jeans. But Didi is a spazz and smaller and clumsier than her. 

"You need to go to the infirmary," she tells her.

"But they'll know we were out," Did protests.

"As bad as Sister O'Brien is, tetanus is way worse."

Even though she knows that when the nuns discover she has been sneaking off every night they'll send her back to the shrink. The last thing she wants to do is discuss with one of those why she likes taking walks through the city after midnight, why she likes the lack of people around – not so long ago she used to walk by day and imagine in every face she met that those were her real parents' faces. A silly kid's dream, and completely gone.

But she's not about to tell those things to a head-doctor. 

Not anymore.

And the other last thing she wants is the nuns reminding her that if she keeps on this path (she's glad Sister Moira is retired though, she was the one who called it " _Satan's path_ " and no one knew if she was joking or what) she will end up alone, and no one will ever love her and yadda yadda yadda.

It's not like she was doing anything bad. She is too young to sneak into bars – plus, this neighborhood, the bar owners all know the girls and boys from St Agnes, they would rat her out in a moment – and she doesn't have money to go to the cinema or buy stuff from 24-hour shops. She just wants to be outside of her room, outside those walls, for a while. Didi was just curious – asking what she did when she went away – and eventually she couldn't say no to bringing her along. 

Still, she's willing to face the music this time, if only because the scratch on Didi's arm would probably haunt her if she didn't. She has already learned that she can't stop herself from getting hurt; she just doesn't want anyone getting hurt on her account, as well.

She is fourteen, the year after the really crappy stuff starts happening, and she is getting used to this: things going wrong, getting caught, getting punished. She's not longer afraid.

 

 

**troublemaker**

She has a repeat of that three years later, when she is already gone.

She was just trying to help the girl.

She's not into shoplifting, let's get her out of the way. She can do it – but she won't. She has other ways of feeding herself.

She's seen the girl around. When you live on the streets you end up more or less knowing all your fellow travellers, specially if they are young girls too.

Tanya is a year younger and if things gets so bad for her that she needs to ask for help, _official_ help, they will call her family and that's the only that can't be allowed to happen.

She catches her trying to inneffectually steal donuts at a convenience store. About to get her sixteen-year-old ass arrested. She takes her away from the place and teaches her to wait for supermarkets to throw away expired food. It's just as risky as shoptlifting, but you're not technically stealing. Of course the supermarkets do not see them that way – capitalism dictates that those who are caught taking what is, basically, _garbage_ , shall be prosecuted.

And that's what happens tonight to her and Tanya.

They are being pursued.

Lucky for them (and unlucky for the night shift guard, sorry, dude) she knows this neighborhood like the palm of her hand. She spent a big chunk of her childhood hiding out in these Hell Kitchen's backstreets.

Jumping over fences is her specialty, and it was since she was still using the MS handle in chatrooms, using her old orphan name, before her first reinvention. She climbs this one easily, and assumes Tanya will simply follow without a problem.

Unfortunately Tanya is inexperienced in more than just shoplifting – she imagined, because Tany is such a slip of a girl, lithe and light, that she'd be okay. She lands badly on her left foot and that's it for their great escape. She tries to lift her from the ground an drag her away but it's no use and the night shift security guard is not that bad at his job and soon he is there, climbing that fence as well.

She could have run and left Tanya behind – but even at that age, even with the consequences she knew she'd have to face, she could have never been that person.

"Troublemaker" is still a kid's word on the social worker's lips, and she is still underage but that security net is not going to last for long. She has to be smarter than this.

She's thinking this – a new reinvention, a new strategy, scrapping it all clean and maybe finally moving out of this dirty city – later she is waiting behind a desk at the police station and she can hardly believe the asshole shop owner is going to press charges. The social worker sympathizes, and those are just as useless as the ones who don't, and she's not sure she prefers the sympathy anyway. She tells the cops she talked Tanya into it – because the girl is younger, because she would never survive in the system. It's been a long time since she found out that it's not hard, after all, convincing the authorities that a white girl was simply led astray by one who wasn't. 

And later, as she settles in her room in this transition home they insist is not juvie, she wonders if she did the right thing. They'll probably send Tanya back to her parents anyway. She'd be better off here. 

 

**cheater**

Blood won't stop coming out of Miles' nose and she considers driving him to the hospital. She doesn't like hospitals. Hospitals are a _risk_. She knows there's a warrant somewhere waiting for her. She's hacked too many places she shouldn't have, made too many enemies, been too careless in the last couple of years.

Only when she goes to the kitchen and gets some ice for him she manages to stop the bleeding.

"I can't believe that asshole thought I cheated," she says again, holding the ice cubes up to Miles' face.

He groans.

"What? You don't think I cheated. Right?"

Miles gives her that blank expression that makes him look dumb sometimes. Then he looks a bit guilty.

"No, of course I don't," he tries, moving his fingers over hers. "But you have done it before. It's kind of your thing, Skye."

"Not with this!"

She's cheated to survive. She has cheated rich college kids out of money they didn't need and she did. She has cheated at pool and poker. She has conned guys who very much deserved to be conned. She has made people pay for her drinks and pay for her food and they never knew what hit them.

But she was never going to cheat in a stupid hacking dare she knew she had the skills to win. And she _destroyed_ that dude. And now she has a new laptop. And they should be celebrating instead of – this. Of course the asshole never considered punching her for it, he decided to punch her boyfriend instead and be vicious about it.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't think this would happen."

He nods as she runs her fingers through his hair comfortingly.

She didn't want this for him, and he warned him, when they started, that she was not a good person to be around. That he'd probably get hurt.

She leaves him asleep on the couch as she goes to throw her bloodied clothes in the washer. Her shirt has a face-shaped stain where she held him through the taxi ride home.

She did not want this for him.

She did not want him to end up like everyone else.

Miles is the only person in the world who has ever thought she's worth a damn and she thought that would finally make a difference and now she got him hurt too. That says something. That means something.

 

 

**virus**

SHIELD falls less than forty-eight hours after she receives her badge.

Other people would call it bad luck. Skye knows better. Skye knows that if the world has to fall apart to make sure she never finds a place in it, then it _will_. She is the thing that will make the foundations of a house unstable, she should have learned that already, the vermin that gnaws a whole building into ruin. It had all been a nice dream; training with Ward, taking the exams, learning the SHIELD protocols by heart, imagining herself part of that legacy, and the look on Coulson's face when he gave her the badge.

If the biggest intelligence organization of the era has to fall to teach her that lesson – that she should stop dreaming – it will.

 

 

**monster**

Is there such a black, putrid thing inside her that someone like him has truly considered she might forgive him and want to be with him? What is it so terrible inside her soul that this monster's soul felt a connection between them? What rotten thing Ward sees when he looks at her that makes him think someday she will love him? 

 

 

**murderer**

It takes her about minute and a half to hack into the Moroccan police department and install the protocol. For a minute and a half she is distracted enough that she almost forgets she just killed a man.

If Coulson were still talking to her he'd be here telling her that it wasn't her fault, that she saved her team with that choice, that this makes her _a hero_ not a murderer. He'd probably use that word, too. Hero. And it's not that Skye does not appreciate May's quiet worry, or Hunter's amused gratitude, but now she's thinking about Coulson's face right after he had to drop Doctor Hall to his death to avoid the death of hundreds and Skye just wishes Coulson was still talking to her even if they wouldn't talk about this, even if they would talk about anything else and everything else or they don't talk at all because Coulson, the other Coulson, was good at that too.

 

 

**thankless daughter**

She feels bad to be happy to be alive. She feels bad to be happy that everyone is okay – more of less – while her mother dies a second death because of her.

All her life she had always wondered what was so bad about her that her mother would want to give her up. She didn't know that not giving her up is what literally killed Jiaying. All her life wanting to be loved only to discover sometimes it's much better not to be loved, to be unloveable. Better for everyone else.

SHIELD has protocols for this, of course, (she knows the textbooks by heart), and Jiaying's body is supposed to be extremely dangerous biological material. In the days of old SHIELD – the days of Hydra – it would have also been a valued subject of object and experimentation. Now they want to lock the remains away, keep it safe. It's _the rules_. But Coulson gives her permission to take the body and give it a proper burial however she chooses.

It's still dangerous so she chooses ashes and the hills surrounding Afterlife. What was Afterlife. She knows the choice is selfish but this is the place where she remembers her mother as brighter; when she took her out and taught her how to move a mountain. Remember that feeling. And she does. This is the one she wants to keep.

She vibrates the air in front of her so that Jiaying's ashes float across the valley below, dancing with the wind.

"She would have liked that," Cal tells her when she comes back and sits with him in his cell and tells him the story of how Jiaying taught her to love her powers. Still in a cell, but now without guards, no longer dangerous.

Yeah, she would have liked that, she thinks, looking at her father's face, _but soon you won't remember any of this_.

 

 

**irresponsible**

Mack looks way too small like this, unconscious on a gurney. Too fragile. It's not right. It's only when Skye slips her hand under the covers and wraps it around his that he recovers his usual, wonderful solidness. But his sleep sends off flat, purely mechanical vibrations, the feel of which disturb Skye. Specially after so many nights of her and Mack holed up in motel rooms in the middle of nowhere – she is familiar with the kind of vibrations he _should_ be emitting, even when asleep.

Coulson sits by her side right now, finally quiet after the rounds of trying to lift blame from each other. He's the Director, it was her operation, in the end they agreed there's enough for both of them to share. 

She keeps the last card, though, the winning chip: "Mack's my partner," she says, and Coulson does not argue with that.

One shouldn't get their partner hurt like this.

She remembers all those times she saw Mack suspicious or frightened of people like her – not her, or if he was, he never let that show in her presence, not once they became partners – and now she's thinking he was right all along. 

She fiddles, and has never been able to stay still in situations like this one – she remembers the awful handful of days besides Fitz's bedside last year, she couldn't go for longer than twenty minutes before impotence and guilt made her body itch and she had to take a break. She decided she was making Simmons more nervous than she already was and cut her visits short until Fitz woke up. It was just as frustrating, not being able to be there with his friend, but she didn't want to be another burden for Jemma.

Now she doesn't have much of an excuse to run away. She's not a doctor, and other than her pathetic attempts at self-pity by staying here all night there's not much she can do for Mack.

"He will recover," Coulson says, rather inneffectually. "I'm sure of it."

There is one thing she can do for him, that's why she went to his quarters earlier.

"He lost his boyfriend to Hydra," she tells Coulson.

"I didn't know that," Coulson says. She takes out the badge and places it on the bedside table, by Mack's head. "That his badge?"

She nods. Mack has kept it all this time. "I thought he would like to see it when he wakes up. I don't know – I would like that kind of thing, you know. If I was ever loved like that, to have people know it and think about it. Even if the guy's gone, Mack should know that people realize how much that mattered. Sorry, I don't really know what I'm saying."

"It's important to have people know who you are," Coulson adds after a while, and she's not surprised he gets it so well.

She wonders if someone knows her like that, or if there's something in her life that matters that much as Tim mattered to Mack. Not even her partner knows her like that. And well, if she is going to push him into danger and if she is going to cause him to end up in a hospital bed unconscious like this Mack should at least know who she is. 

"It was my turn to pay for dinner, you know," she says out loud, not really needing Coulson to listen. Knowing he does anyway. "Mack's really good at keeping tabs. After a dangerous mission we always treat the other to some nice meal and _it was my turn_ tonight."

She distracts herself making a mental list of where she'd want to take him when he wakes up. The kind of thing a partner does.

Partners also follow partners into risk, selflessly, stupidly, so right now she wishes Mack had never been her partner at all.

In the end he does recover like Coulson said. In the end he does wake up with Skye still guarding his dreamless sleep. And for a moment the relief is such that nothing else matters, that she forgets what it feels like, to be responsible for something like this.

 

**poison**

But the world does not let her forget that easily.

The bastard broke three fingers in Coulson's right hand, one by one, slowly and methodically, after he made sure Skye was watching the video feed. There was no sound but somehow imagining it made it all worse, and now Skye is haunted by the noise of precious bones breaking.

She can barely look at them, the bandages and the metal braces. But it's easier than looking at Coulson's face right now.

"He hurt you to hurt me," she says.

Coulson shakes his head, finding his still-hoarse voice. "I honestly don't think Grant Ward needs an excuse to torture me."

"Yeah but... he knew what it would mean _to me_."

He can't move his arm but he can stretch to kiss her face. Skye thinks that this is one man she cannot afford to bring hurt to. This is one person, out of everybody who has been or will be in her life, she cannot afford to lose. So this is the person she can't least afford to be around, the logical conclusion is. Except she falters, ignoring a lifetime of signals and lessons, wanting for this person to be the one she gets to keep.

 

 

**terror**

She finishes her phone conversation with the hospital to find out that Coulson, in the meantime, has already showered, slipped into the clothes he uses for pajamas, and gone out to buy some suspiciously-looking egg and cress sandwiches and some chocolate bars. It's not that often they get to go on the road together, she shouldn't waste it.

"What's up with the twin beds? You're not getting shy on me, are you?" she asks, trying to distract herself from the day they have had.

"Only room they had in the whole area," he explains.

When they turn on the tv the local channels are still on about The Incident. They talk about it as a terrifying tragedy, even though the only one who got hurt was the young Inhuman boy causing it.

"Terror? I think that one is new," she comments. Coulson gives her a sideways look and she rolls her eyes a bit at his worry. "After being called an _abomination_ there isn't much that can get to me."

Coulson has long since learned not to ask her to turns off the news.

It does get to her, of course. But he knows that.

He watches her watch.

The anchors have to strike a balance between the fact that Agent Johnson did defuse the situation with her powers there, and how scary everybody in town finds those powers. Journalistic truth diluted by populist panic. She could scream at how offensive she finds that; she used to do this for a living (well, she didn't earn any money from it, but she had the ethics). She is too distracted by her indignation, rewriting the day's coverage in her head, like she's still that person, like she still had her podcast and a desire to tell the truth to the world, how would she do it? Well, for starters she wouldn't use the word "terror". She is so distracted that she misses the moment when Coulson stands up from his tiny bed and walks up to hers, gesturing for her to scoot over.

Skye glares at him for a moment, then moves to one side.

"Okay, okay," she sighs, once she decides to let go, and lets Coulson slip under the covers of her bed and wrap one arm around her shoulders.

She would tell him she doesn't need comforting, she would tell him that the twin bed is way too narrow for both of them to fit. But she does neither.

Her face pressed to the crook of his neck. They haven't really talked about this – what they are doing. They know but they don't give it a name. Maybe they are careful. Maybe they are afraid. She remembers what it's like to be afraid of losing that warmth at the end of the night –Coulson stays in her quarters most evenings, twin beds in hotels are the exception not the rule– but she doesn't remember it being so sharp. She used to curl around Miles, praying not to lose him now that she had found him, but always knowing she would survive if she did lose him. With Coulson is different; she doesn't hold on so tightly to him, but she cannot imagine her world if he wasn't there.

"Your feet are cold," she says.

"Poor blood circulations. One of the many perks of being with me."

He soft about it –he is always soft– but she can't stop thinking about the chain of events, starting with her mother, that made him lose his hand and the joke cuts a little too deep into her.

The local anchor repeats that word, _terror_ , like a well-timed accusation.

"One of the many perks of being with _me_ ," she mutters.

Coulson doesn't reply. 

And maybe she's the one who would have been a crappy journalist.

Maybe they're using the right word.

 

 

**killer**

This shouldn't count.

Grant Ward is not a victim.

So he doesn't count as _her victim_.

But, necessary as it was, because he didn't give her a choice, it's the first time she uses her powers to kill someone and that changes everything.

Everything around the base stops after it happens; the whole place comes to a standstill. They have been battling the big bad wolf for so long – years, she can't believe they have wasted years on this monster – that once it's done, for a few seconds, nobody knows how to react. Everyone talks in whispers, as if a louder sound might bring him back from the dead. People narrow their eyes at the news, suspicious, having seen this horror movie one too many times, with the knowledge that when you think the killer is dead he will rise up one last time.

(well, _he did_ , that's why he left her no choice)

But it changes things for her – not killing someone, that she left behind some time ago, but the manner in which she killed him.

"To save lives," Coulson says in the darkness – she couldn't stand to face him tonight – touching her wrist when he feels her weight slip around him and holds his breath. Everything needs to be a whisper, in the dark, today, even sex, even them.

She wraps her hands gently around his neck for balance, thinking _Does he realize that at any moment I am capable of killing him?_ and Coulson never looks afraid, and he never looks ignorant of her power, never careless.

She waits for the moment when she can believe him and starts seeing herself through Coulson's eyes again. She knows it will come, the moment when Grant Ward stops being her victim and goes back to being another horrible thing she stopped from happening.

She knows she's imagining things but even her room smells like blood for a while afterwards.

 

 

**weapon**

She remembers now: the first person she ever got hurt was herself.

"We are weapons, we were always meant to be weapons," Lincoln says, a hopelessness in his eyes she has never seen before.

The rest of the people around her have more or less the same look.

"We are not supposed to control it," he adds with a pained expression.

She's heard that one before.

To hell with it.

No one – no, not even a powerful conquering alien race; she's that _stubborn_ – is going to wage war against the Earth using whatever is inside her people that makes them who they are. She doesn't care if they put it there in the first place. It's theirs now. They spent centuries telling themselves stories that made all the horror of their origins sound like a wonderful gift – until it became a gift. Stories can do that. They have way more power than these blue assholes and their genetic mind control. "Just watch this," she tells Lincoln, walking away from where they have them prisoners. Weren't they asking for a leader? She's been running away from that word for almost two years now. _Okay, Raina. Okay, mom_. She's ready now.

When the moment comes of course the Kree can't win, they don't stand a chance.

She never wanted to get herself hurt – but she will, if it means keeping everyone else alive.

_What are you doing this? Why are you resisting?_ She can't really understand the language but she gets the meaning. Their masters don't need to use words with them anyway. Why is she doing this? Why the broken bones again, the kind of pain she thought she had left behind? Because all her people need is faith. To see that the spell can be broken. To see that they are free to choose. That they have always been free.

I was never meant to hurt people, she decides, stopping the vibrations from leaving her body. I was meant to protect them.

She never wanted to get herself hurt.

But it's a small price to pay for saving the world.

 

 

**unloveable**

Damnit that is bright.

She's been slipping in and out of consciousness for hours but she doesn't remember it being this bright.

"Ouch, what are you doing?" she asks.

Simmons gets the light off her face, finally.

"Just checking," she says. "You've been sleeping for a long time."

"Well, you gave me a lot of drugs."

Simmons smiles sweetly at her.

She sits up a bit, experimentally. Her head hurts. Everything else hurts a lot more than her head. Something inside her feels heavy, like the million bees trapped under her skin are licking their wounds as well, unable to move. The world is a bit numbed, she can't properly feel the vibrations around her, and while normally that's a relief for a bit – the world is very distracting – she feels a bit lonely without the proper song of things in her head.

She sighs. "How long –?"

"Just one day," Simmons replies.

There's nothing "just" about it. It's tomorrow. In itself that's a miracle. For a moment there she thought there was never going to be any tomorrow.

Her head clears and it suddenly comes back. The pain firsts, and her fists clench around her casts at the memory. Then she remembers coming home, being brought home. She knows Coulson spent the night by her side, predictably. He was there the first couple of times she came around, confused, unable to speak or remember what she had just said. She's a bit disappointed he's not here now, when he finally feels a bit better, but life is not a movie and the Kree have left enough mess in their wake that SHIELD is going to be buried in damage control for weeks. She's almost glad she's an invalid again or she'd be working right now.

Simmons tells her she won't be able to use her powers for a while. She doesn't mind. She thinks she can take a vacation from this whole superhero deal. Somewhere warm and soft and with lots of free booze.

She looks around. A swarm of activity behind the glass doors keeping her from the noise. Everybody busy, moving fast, with a "phew, we are alive" spring in their steps. By her side the team had gathered a bunch of gifts for her. Snacks, mostly. A thermo with May's favorite blend of tea (still very hot, May must have been sitting with her up until just now). A stack of magazines and where the hell does Bobbi manage to always have current ones. Actual decent books from Andrew.

She notices a small object humbly tucked away on the corner of the table.

"What is this?" she asks.

"Coulson's lanyard," Simmons replies, and huffs. "He said you would want it when you woke up. I don't know why it was so important that he left it here. How does he expect to get through doors around here now? This is a security risk. And why would you want his lanyard with you when you woke up. I don't understand."

She thinks about all the names she's been called through the years, all the people she has hurt, and she goes back to the very first moment, the nuns at St Agnes and how they mapped the grim future for her if she kept misbehaving, she keeps going to that very first lecture when they assured her that no one was ever going to care if she lived or die, that no one was going to care.

And the worst part is, for years and years, she almost believed them.

"I understand," she says, touching the flat plastic card, smiling.


End file.
